The USENET Cookbook

(Recipes and food lore from the global village)

A collection by the readers of USENET, from the newsgroup alt.gourmand. 

Edited by 
Brian K. Reid.
Palo Alto, California, U.S.A.
decwrl!reid reid@decwrl.dec.com


Created 19 July 1994

Copyright (C) 1994 USENET Community Trust

Permission to copy without fee all or part of this material is granted provided that the copies are not made or distri- buted for direct commercial advantage, the USENET copyright notice, title, and publication date appear, and notice is given that copying is by permission of the USENET Community Trust.

The new electronic interdependence recreates the world in the image of a global village. -Marshall McLuhan, 1967

Introduction

This is a community cookbook, from an invisible worldwide electronic community. Like all community cookbooks, it has the favorite recipes of the members of the community, suitably edited and organized. The USENET Cookbook is a collection of the favorite recipes of USENET readers worldwide.

Usenet

USENET is the network by which Unix computer users talk to each other. It is a worldwide net, made from computer-to-computer telephone links, linking some 500,000 people at 7,000 sites in 30 countries. Besides serving an obvious technical and scientific purpose, USENET is also a medium for linking worldwide social groups of people who share common interests. As an experiment in interactive electronic publication, some members of USENET decided in 1985 to make a cookbook of favorites from their ``global village''. Brian Reid of DEC Western Research in Palo Alto, California, organized the venture and wrote much of the requisite software.

The USENET Cookbook is an online database distributed with the intention that it be published as a book. The USENET Cookbook is distributed with software that enables every user to make his own customized edition of it, leaving out the recipes that he has no interest in, and perhaps adding a few of his own that he hasn't yet submitted to the network. There will be many different versions and editions of it, all with the same title, and all copyrighted. Every user can choose whether to print the recipes in imperial units (cups and spoons) or in metric units.


Distribution

The USENET Cookbook is distributed in the newsgroup named alt.gourmand. It is a ``moderated'' newsgroup, which means that everything published in it must be approved by the moderator (editor). Readers submit recipes electronically by mailing them to the editor. He edits for style, form, and content, and performs conversion to or from metric units if necessary. The finished recipes are published in weekly batches, which are sent from Palo Alto every Thursday.

Procedure

To participate, you will need to get alt.gourmand at your site. A package of software for using it is posted from time to time into alt.gourmand. Get that software and install it on your machine; it will enable you to save recipes easily and to print cookbooks from them.

To submit a recipe to the USENET Cookbook, mail its text to the newsgroup moderator, recipes@decwrl.DEC.COM. The news software at most sites will do this automatically if you try to post to alt.gourmand. It's important that you tell us where you got the recipe from. It's ok if you cribbed it from a book or magazine or newspaper, but if you copy the words that you found there, you have probably violated a copyright. Copyright law is complex, and only a lawyer can reliably advise you on whether or not you are violating it, but in general if you rewrite a recipe, in your own words, even if you don't change the formula, then you are not infringing the copy- right by submitting that recipe to the network. The copy- right is on the words that explain the recipe, and not the recipe itself. 

Copyright

The entire USENET Cookbook is copyright by the USENET Com- munity Trust, which is a California organization formed for the purpose of holding the copyright. The purpose of this copyright is to prevent commercialization of the Cookbook.